The Victors Sing the Loudest Songs
by annafan
Summary: A Dunlending woman in Bree muses on the arrival of King Elessar and his retinue. (Grim. A million miles from my usual fluffy output. I'm not normally one for trigger warnings, but in this case, be warned, this tackles racism, rape, forced abortion and infanticide. None of it is graphic, however, hence still being a T rating.)
Do you gossip, woman of Gondor?

You see, I've seen you looking at me. You know who I am. Or rather, what I am.

I don't mean gossip to the other women in the King's retinue. I know you'll do that. Not that you'll need to – they've got eyes. They'll see me too. No, I mean will you gossip to the locals? To… I'd call them my friends, but that's overdoing it. It's a tight-knit place, Bree. A small town. And like small towns the world over, the locals keep themselves to themselves. It takes, what, four or five years before they stop staring. Twenty or so (or at least that's what I'm told: I haven't got there yet) before you're given some sort of acceptance. So, not exactly friends. But they tolerate me. They're polite to me. Some are kind to me in a distant sort of way. Others at least recognise that I do a hard day's work, that I'm honest, that I keep my son clean and bring him up polite.

But the good thing, the best thing, is they don't care that my skin's a bit sallow, that my hair's dark. (But not that glossy black of the Ship Men, oh no, just an ordinary dark brown colour, nothing special. Not the midnight dark against which your lovely Star Lady's lights shine. Just a dull brown like the earth I spent my childhood tilling. Funny thing that. The earth is beautiful – so rich, so warm. But for some reason I see my hair through your eyes. I don't have a way of seeing it through my own. But now I'm wandering, getting off the point.)

The point is, I've been happy here, in Bree. Maybe it's the hobbits out Staddle way. Maybe it's because they've had to get used to the differences between hobbits and men, so they don't feel the need to make long lists of the differences between one sort of man and another.

They don't have this shit about High Men, and Middle Men, and Men of the Twilight. That's me, by the way. Or rather, a woman of the twilight. But of course you know that. It's the first thing you saw when you looked at me.

Oh, there are the Dunedain, the Rangers, who come by Bree every so often. Your king started out as one of them, so my boss tells me. "He used to like a pint of my fine ale, the King did..." Mr. Butterbur's so proud of "Strider" having been one of his customers. Still sometimes looks like he can't believe it. But I don't think the folk of Bree realise that the Rangers are "High Men". They just see them as a bit odd. But that's because of their habits, and the way they keep their own counsel. Not because they see them as a different type of man.

But you're not like the folk in Bree. You've been brought up to your fine background. So the first thing you saw was a Dunlending. Brown hair – muddy brown hair. Sallow skin. A lesser man.

The second thing you saw was someone whose folk sided with the White Wizard. Or at least, that's how you tell the story. And maybe to start with, we did side with him. But back then you thought he was on the right side too. And we had our reasons. Oh yes…

Remember the Middle Men? Not as good as the Ship People, but close? Good enough that you'll let your steward marry one. (Though not your king – only an elf was good enough for him, eh? Mind you, I heard as your steward was only her second choice. Gossip is one thing that does cross the gap between races).

Yes, those middle men. The ones who upheld the Oath of Eorl. What a great story that is, of the enduring friendship between your peoples. The favoured people, and the other lot, just about good enough to cling to your coat tails.

So there you were, a score or so of generations back. The Wainriders were crossing the Great River, running amok in the land north of the Stone City, between the mountains and the river. And then brave men from the north came to your help. Between you, you drove off the invaders. And those brave men, with their blond hair, and their sharp swords and their shields – they weren't as good as you, of course, but they were pretty handy in a fight. So they got given the title of "almost as good as us", and you gave them the empty land to the north of your border.

Because of course it was empty. Except that it wasn't. Only empty of people, if by people you mean the Ship People. It wasn't empty of my people. But we were just Men of the Twilight. So you and the blond northmen shifted us off our fertile fields and rich pastures. The horselords got those. And we got the wild moorlands, where sod all grows and the grass is so poor you can count your cow's ribs, and the winter comes early and the spring comes late and your ewes lose half their lambs.

Not of course that your tales tell the story that way. Or the songs of the horselords. Their songs of Eorl the Young on the field of Celebrant. Oh yes, I know their songs. The songs scare me to be honest. Because of when they sing them. When they're in their cups – when they're drunk. When they're winding themselves up to show they're better than us. Then the drink spills over into the urge to teach us a lesson. To show who's boss. To show the few men who haven't been put to the sword that they might as well have been.

And we – we women – we know one of the ways they do that. Take the enemy's women. Sometimes out of lust, sometimes just marking territory, like a dog pissing up a wall. That's all we mean to men like that. A piss-covered wall. Not women. Not people. Not that Dunlendings are people.

You don't like to think of that, woman of Gondor? How heroes, the brave allies that came to your aid, might behave when they're far from their own women folk? Because if the horselords behave thus, maybe your own menfolk do the same, when they're away from you. You'd much rather think of them as noble heroes, stern in battle but merciful to their enemies.

Except that underneath it, you know. Because that's the third thing you noticed, isn't it? My son's blond hair, blond the colour of ripe corn.

It doesn't matter here in Bree. Because it's just hair colour – means nothing here, doesn't instantly mark you out as one thing or another… as better or lesser, or completely beneath mention. No one looks at him and thinks "his mother… we know what happened to her..."

Though the funny thing is, it didn't, or at least not quite the way you think. For I took up with the captain of the troops stationed in our village. By choice. If you can call it a choice. I knew what would happen, see. One man that I could pretend to like, or the whole damn lot of them, who wouldn't care whether I liked them or not. Might even prefer it if they knew I didn't like it. There are men who find that the best part. (You know that too, woman of Gondor, though you pretend not to. All women know that. We see it in the eyes of the men who think that way. Not all of them… just enough).

So that's why I "chose" one. Lesser of two evils. Said I'd cook for him and clean for him as well as warm his bed. And told him (having lost my man at Helm's Deep) I knew how to warm a man's bed so he'd want to come back to it the next night. See, I might have muddy hair and brown skin, but we all look the same in the dark. Least that's what I hear the men say the morning after as they nurse their sore heads from the ale and talk about their conquests. How does that make you feel, woman of Gondor? Knowing that in the dark you're just the same as me – nothing but a body to be used. Nothing at all. Nothing.

Of course, when they left – moved on to put down a rebellion – I was left in hell. Had my head shaved for being the enemy's tart. Made to run naked through the streets, pelted with shit. Not that it actually made that much of a difference. They shaved the heads of the women who hadn't "chosen", the ones who'd screamed for help while the villagers tried to pretend it wasn't happening, not to their wives and sweethearts and daughters. We were all "soiled" - didn't matter whether we'd made a choice or not. Like there was a fucking choice in any case.

Ha! Fucking choice! I just made a joke and I didn't know it. Shame the joke isn't funny.

Then I realised I was with child. And you know what happens to women who fall pregnant like this. Or maybe you don't, woman of Gondor. First the wise woman tries to give them herbs. Then maybe they'll try the long bodkin. Maybe it'll work, or maybe the girl will die. Or maybe she'll just go on to have the child, with the wise woman ready with a bucket of water. "Oh, the poor bairn never took its first breath." We may be lesser by your way of looking at things, but it works both ways. Our people don't want tow-haired children in our blood line either.

So I ran – ran north, landed up in Bree. Spun them a yarn about having lost my man (half true that one – just he wasn't the bairn's father), and the orcs having salted the fields so I had nothing to grow. Managed to find work, made a place for myself by working my arse off.

And yes, my bairn has hair the colour of gold, and it is beautiful – he is beautiful. And if I believe that all this shit about high men and middle men and lesser men is just that, shit, I can't hold it against him. And I have to believe that a man goes out and makes his own life, he doesn't carry the sins of his father in his blood. Otherwise, knowing what I do about his father, how could I love him? No, bloodlines don't make a man, how he acts make a man. How he chooses to act. Really chooses. When he has a real choice.

So now you know, woman of Gondor. Will you gossip? Ach, why do I pretend? You don't know. These words are only in my head. I can't speak them aloud. Can't sing my song. Only the victors get to sing of how the world is.

How can I tell you any of this, when I see the way you look at me?

~o~O~o~

 **Author's Note: R** ape as a weapon of war is as ancient as war itself. See for instance, Antony Beevor's book, _Berlin_ (the story he reports of a Jewish Russian officer being shocked to discover a woman offering herself as his mistress in order to save herself from gang rape formed one of the starting points of this story).

Another set of images which has always stuck vividly in my mind is that of the female collaborators in France at the end of World War II, shaven headed and forced to run through the streets. A few may have been willing collaborators (the history of Vichy France is complex and I don't want to oversimplify it in a short author's note) but many were women forced into relationships with threats of violence, or out of a simple desire to survive, who then found themselves villified. And there seems to be a peculiarly and frightenly misogynistic strand to the treatment of those found guilty of "collaboration horizonale" which is nicely summed up by Antony Beevor:

" It may seem strange that head-shaving, essentially a rightwing phenomenon, should have become so widespread during the leftist liberation euphoria in France in 1944. But many of the tondeurs, the head-shavers, were not members of the resistance. Quite a few had been petty collaborators themselves, and sought to divert attention from their own lack of resistance credentials. Yet resistance groups could also be merciless towards women. In Brittany it is said that a third of those civilians killed in reprisals were women. And threats of head-shaving had been made in the resistance underground press since 1941." Antony Beevor, in the Guardian Newspaper

Another thing which may shock some of my readers is that I've made the Rohirrim the bad guys in this story. The sad thing is that rape seems to be widely perpetrated by armies on both sides of conflicts. How well it is kept in check depends on military discipline and the willingness of senior officers to see the issue as one which they have to tackle. But even the "good guys" rape, as Nisha Lilia Diu's article on UN Peacekeeping forces in Bosnia from the Daily Telegraph shows.

(Sorry, the links won't work on this site, but if you want to check them out, you can find them on the copy of this story on Archive of Our Own).


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